For builders
Websites for builders
Your customer is about to hand over tens of thousands of pounds to someone they met once.
Building work involves the largest sums a homeowner will spend outside of buying the house itself, over the longest timescale, with the least ability to judge whether it is going well. That makes the website's job different from every other trade: it is not really selling the work, it is reducing fear. I build sites for building firms that answer the question people are too polite to ask, which is whether you are going to take the deposit and vanish.
What your customer is actually deciding
Someone planning an extension has usually been thinking about it for a year and has three builders coming to quote. By the time they contact you they have already looked you up, and the site is doing its work before you ever meet. What they are quietly checking is scale, whether you have done a job the size of theirs, and continuity, whether you have been trading long enough to still be here when the snagging list comes round.
Where most builders’ websites go wrong
Almost every builder's site is a gallery of finished rooms with no captions. A photograph of a beautiful kitchen extension tells the visitor nothing about how big the job was, how long it took, or whether you handled the planning application. The second failure is total silence on process, which is the thing the customer is most anxious about. The third is no mention of insurance, guarantees or who the customer speaks to when something goes wrong.
A couple have saved for a rear extension and have three names, one from a neighbour and two from a search. They will look at all three sites in the same evening. Two of them are galleries with no words. The third explains what happens in week one, who is on site, how payments are staged, and what a job like theirs typically costs. That third builder gets the first call and usually the benefit of the doubt on price.
The pages a builder actually needs
Not a generic five-page template. These are the pages that earn their place on a building firm website.
- 01
Extensions
The bread and butter, and worth its own page with a genuine price range. Single storey, double storey, wrap-around, side return, with photographs captioned by what the job actually was rather than just how it looked at the end.
- 02
Loft conversions
A distinct search with distinct worries: head height, staircases, whether it counts as a bedroom, and building regulations. Answering those on the page qualifies the enquiry before you spend an afternoon on a survey.
- 03
Renovations and refurbishments
Whole-house work where the customer usually has to move out. The page needs to be honest about timescales and about how you handle a job where the scope moves once walls come down.
- 04
How a build actually runs
The page nobody builds and everybody wants. Week one, who is on site, how payments are staged, what happens when the scope changes, and how snagging works at the end. This is the page that wins jobs against cheaper quotes.
- 05
Insurance, guarantees and planning
Public liability, any warranty scheme you belong to, and whether you handle the planning application and building control or expect the customer to. Say it plainly. Vagueness here reads as evasion, whether or not it is.
Three mistakes worth fixing first
If you do nothing else with your current site, start here. All three are cheap to put right.
- 01
A gallery with no captions
Forty photographs of finished rooms, no context. The visitor cannot tell whether that kitchen was a twelve week job or a three week one, or whether it is even the kind of work you want. Two sentences under each photograph turns an album into evidence.
- 02
Nothing about process
The customer's real fear is not that the work will look wrong, it is that it will drag on, cost more than agreed, and become impossible to get answers about. A page describing how you stage payments and handle changes addresses that directly, and almost no competitor will have one.
- 03
No sense of job size
If your smallest job is thirty thousand pounds, say so. You will lose enquiries you were never going to take and you will stop wasting evenings quoting for people who wanted a garden wall rebuilt.
What people type when they need a builder
Roughly the shape of the searches worth being found for. Put your own town where the brackets are, because local intent is where a small business can genuinely outrank a bigger one.
- builders near me
- extension builders [your town]
- loft conversion [your town]
- house extension cost
- local building company
I set this up during the build rather than selling it back to you afterwards as an SEO package. What I will not do is promise you the top spot, because nobody can honestly promise that.
What it costs
A website for a building firm starts at £1,000 for up to five pages, live in about two weeks. You get one number in writing before anything starts, and it does not move unless you ask for something that was not in the brief. Hosting and your domain run separately at roughly £100 to £150 a year, and the care plan is optional.
The full breakdown is on the pricing page. You talk to me the whole way through, because there is nobody else to talk to. I have been doing this for 12 years and I am still reachable after launch, with 30 days of free tweaks while you settle in.
What clients say
“Jay created a new website for me, exactly how I wanted it. Jay went above and beyond my expectations. Highly recommended.”
“Jay is a kind, devoted and enthusiastic professional. He will be eager to work efficiently on your project and deliver it in no time.”
“Just had Jay make me a website and new logo. Very knowledgeable and great at what he does. I didn’t know what I wanted and left it to Jay - very happy with end result.”
Questions builders ask
Other trades I build for
Websites for carpenters, Websites for architects, Websites for roofers. There is also a general page for trades and, if being local matters to you, web design in Essex.
Tell me about the business
A couple of lines is plenty. I will come back with what it would cost, how long it takes, and what I would need from you.
Send a message
It goes straight to my inbox and I will get back to you as soon as I can.